The Gift or Nada Gift

Daniel Ladinsky, author of  "The Gift"  is a Sufi who doesn't read, write or speak Farsi, but claims  he heard the poems from Hafiz himself in a dream. 

 "I feel my relationship to Hafiz defies all reason" he says in the book's introduction. "It is really an attempt to do the impossible, to translate light into words... About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as a never-ending, boundless sun (God), who sang hundreds of verses of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give his message to 'my fellow artists and art seekers' ".

In a blog he wrote for the Huffington Post  in 2009 he says:

"The words guru, swami, super swami, master,
teacher, yogi, murshid, priest -- most of those
sporting such a title are just peacocks.

The litmus test is to hold them upside down
over a cliff for a few hours. If they don't wet
their pants ... maybe you found a real one."

Following is one of the poems supposedly spoken to Ladinsky by Hafiz:

Tired of Speaking Sweetly

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and could give the Beloved His choice,
Some nights He would just drag you around the room by your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds all your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep on too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us up in a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear He is in such a "playful drunken mood"
Most everyone I know quickly packs their bags
And hightails it out of town.

Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

A lot of critics accuse Ladinsky of out-right fraud and deception. Murat Nemet Nejat, a modern Turkish essayist and poet, asserts: 

"Ladinsky's book is an original poem masquerading as a translation... As God talked to Moses in Hebrew, to Mohammad in Arabic, Hafiz spoke to Daniel Ladinsky in English. Mr. Ladinsky is translating a dream, not a 14th century Persian text.  As such, the book is worse than a failure; it is a deception, a marketing rip-off of his name.  There are no original Farsi versions of this poem which actually comes from an American Sufi and his interpretation of  'light'".

"Why does the title of the book say, "Poems by Hafiz," and not "based on" or something in that vein? The charitable answer would be that Mr. Ladinsky did not know any better, that he truly believes he is translating Hafiz and The Gift is a visionary labor of love. He told me as much in a telephone conversation, pointing to how well the book is doing, when I asked him to refer me to one or two specific Hafiz Gazels in the book, which he could not. The second answer is that "Hafiz" is a marketable brand name. Would Arkana have published this book if its author was merely Daniel Ladinsky? I am also curious if Penguin has ever vetted the nature of these translations."